Mad Voter: Bruce is Romanoff's foil on taxes

As Colorado Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff leads the charge to raise taxes yet again on Colorado's working families, he is doing so with a solid strategy in mind. He is running against Douglas Bruce.

Bruce, the author of Colorado Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, has become the state's poster child for bad behavior. During his four-month tenure this spring as a freshman member of the state's House of Representatives, he has earned plenty of enemies.

Bruce started off his first week in office this January with a bang, garnering national media attention for kicking a Rocky Mountain News reporter. Over the next three months, he earned the occasional headline for his politically incorrect and troublesome antics. After a floor rant last week, however, where he called migrant farm workers "illiterate peasants," most fellow lawmakers finally made the decision to ignore the Colorado Springs Republican.

That is except for Romanoff, who benefits by having Bruce as his most ardent foe. Romanoff, the Golden Boy for the state's Democrats, wants to use his final days in office (he is term-limited this year) to gut the spending limits set under Bruce's TABOR, a 1992 constitutional amendment approved by voters.

As Romanoff tells it, his plan would reconcile conflicts between TABOR—which requires state and local governments to go to voters for approval on all tax increases—and Amendment 23—a subsequent amendment that requires mandated spending increases annually for the state's K-12 education system.

Romanoff initially proposed his constitutional amendment as a referendum, meaning two-thirds of the state's 100 elected lawmakers would have had to vote in his favor to have the effort put before voters this November.

When it became clear in recent days, however, that he could only garner moderate support from those in his party, as well as a handful of weaker Republicans, a flustered Romanoff began pushing his measure as a citizen's initiative. To get his measure on the ballot this way, he'd have to get more than 76,000 valid voter signatures and navigate a cumbersome approval process within the Secretary of State's office. He'd also need to raise at least $300,000—and that's not including the millions it would take for a paid-media campaign that could help ensure voter approval in November.

Enter Bruce. Not surprisingly, given recent behavior, the headlines have thus far all gone in Romanoff's favor. Wednesday's Denver Post carried a report headlined "Bruce's lip sinking his ship?" while a Rocky Mountain News report was titled "Going head to head on TABOR." Below the headline, side-by-side headshots of Romanoff and Bruce appeared. Sadly, Bruce's bad behavior has helped ensure that the debate over Romanoff's tax crusade becomes a battle of personalities—and not fact.

At a hearing Wednesday, Bruce unexpectedly showed up at a House State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee hearing. He not only testified against Romanoff's measure, but called Romanoff's claims that his proposal would maintain a TABOR provision that allows voters to approve every tax increase "utter nonsense."

But while Bruce is frequently off his rocker, he's right that Romanoff's House Concurrent Resolution 1014, dubbed "Savings Account for Education," promises to rob taxpayers of important safeguards against excessive taxation.

Jessica Peck Corry is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo.

While almost all other lawmakers reject Bruce's rhetoric, many centrists and conservatives are also acutely aware of the danger of raising taxes during tough economic times. Today, ordinary taxpayers are increasingly skeptical of—and resistant to—giving their hard earned money to government.

And they should be. While most reporters remain content to continue their love affair with Romanoff, they fail to mention that this is the same guy who has sold us every other tax increase we've seen over the last decade. Most notably, he was the salesman for 2005's Referendum C—where he promised us that if we gave the state $2.7 billion, he'd make sure it would go into three specific funding pools for Colorado's colleges, health care, and K-12 education. But three years later, the cost of Ref C has more than doubled—now up around $6 billion. And we're being told that this still isn't enough.

With Romanoff at the helm of the House during the last legislative session, we've heard the following: To be good stewards of our state's higher education system, we must vote to increases taxes on the state's energy producers. To be good stewards of our highways, we must accept significant fee increases when we go to register our vehicles. And to make sure that we don't bankrupt our children's future, we must now support Romanoff's latest proposed constitutional change. All of this just three years after we agreed to cough up $6 billion.

In Romanoff's world, our government can never have enough money. And so in the waning days of his reign, he will do everything he can to fill the state's coffers. He will run against Doug Bruce. In the end, however, for the Democrats' Golden Boy, even this may not be enough.

Editor’s note: Jessica Peck Corry's weekly blogs are part of a feature on PoliticsWest called "Diary of a Mad Voter." The group blog, published in partnership with NewWest.Net/Politics, is intended to give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the 2008 election year.

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